Ronald Wayne Langacker (born December 27, 1942) is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.
Born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Langacker received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1966.
From 1966 until 2003, he was professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.
Langacker further assumes that linguistic structures are motivated by general cognitive processes.
In formulating his theory, he makes extensive use of principles of gestalt psychology and draws analogies between linguistic structure and aspects of visual perception.